I’ll keep my soul this morning, a consolation
prize, fledgling my mother once nourished
with a pot of stove-warmed water carried
to a tepid bath, hence my first thought
while looking out the early window:
the moon as a pot of stove-warmed water
your mother carried to your tepid bath, hence
my conclusion that perhaps good John Keats
was wrong, that the world isn’t the vale
of soul-making so much as it is the river
running through the vale in which souls
can drown. I knew I was flailing when
yesterday a sparrow landed next to me
in the grocery store parking lot and I
had nothing to say to it, whereas when
my son ate boot-slush off the doormat
I yelled at him, sent him without a bath
to bed though he shook from the gouts of ice
that slid melting down his gullet. Since when
had I become a wiggler unworthy of a bait-hook
squirming on the shanty floor, I wondered, my negative
capability increasing through the night until the boy
woke crying, the woodstove fire dead.
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